...no biggie. What they will do is to have the Ward Clerk fudge the attendance numbers. That way they can show SLC the need for more Missionaries, supplemental funding, or the need to expand Ward boundaries. Tithing is described as lacking due to low economic demographics or member movement in/out of Ward. Seen it, done it before...SOP.

I was a ward clerk for a while. We counted the empty sacrament cups to determine a head count for sacrament meeting. The bishop had me add 20 to the total, you know, some people don't take the sacrament and some are visitors who also don't take the sacrament.

Of course they weren't ALL named Festus. But there was always a ward clerk counting people during sacrament meeting. Just one of many oddities that I didn't think much about because all of the adults seemed to think nothing of it. Every Sunday, some guy is sitting or standing or walking up the aisle visibly counting heads with his fingers.

It's God's church...so that must be God's counting guy. All is inspired and all is well...all is well...or was well...until one flew over the cuckoo's nest and dropped some weird white goo on everyone. But that's a story for another day.

I was a ward clerk for a while too. The Bishop had me walk up and down the aisle during the talks to take a count. He was never happy with my numbers. So he took it upon himself to take a count himself. After he found I was right, he directed me to add 25 to the numbers each week.

When I was ward clerk, I assigned the membership clerk the responsibility to walk the aisles and count the people. On those rare occasions when he missed sacrament meeting, I had to do the head count.

My bishop never asked me to alter any numbers, but the stake clerk was a different story. On more than one occasion, he asked that I come to his house and review numbers. He was retired, and he spent many hours reviewing and re-reviewing every number. He'd ask me questions like "why is it that course 14 in Sunday School had an average attendance of twelve in the first quarter and only eight last quarter?" I tried telling him once that I just reported what the auxiliary secretaries reported to me, but he didn't accept that answer. I learned to report fictitious numbers that were close to, and sometimes slightly better than, the previous quarter.

When I was growing up my Dad was a ward clerk, then in the Bishopric for many years. He always said their was a general 40% pattern in the church. Generally the numbers would always come in around 30-40%, for every statistic. 30-40% of members on the roll would be "active". 30-40% of the "active" members would be full tithe payers and have recommends. Home teaching would always be around 30-40%. When I was a ward clerk, that turned out to be the case. When looking at the church as a whole, the best reliable estimates put the total active population at around 6 million members or so, which would put it in that 30-40% range of the 16 million global members the church likes to talk about.

I never understood the Mormon obsession with numbers. On the other hand, I never complained when my assigned friend (home teacher) counted me as visited when he waved at me when I drove past his house.

So here are my numbers from SM in the 1990s (+350 members outside of Utah).

About 6 families (with 4-5 children moved out of the area). It dropped SM counts by some 25-30. I remember one month, I think it was Feb that dropped the number to 140 from 185 (and those numbers well inflated). Once a month, I sat in his living room and provided him a gazillion church reports. He questioned every stat and I had to have some sort of justification through roster reports, last month's report as well as the previous years' reports.

The bishop looked over at me and tossed everything on the floor. "Messy, I don't buy it. Your numbers are off and this report is garbage. How do you plan to fix it?"

I reminded him about the 6 families leaving and the stormy weather, but like a good Mormon bishop he rejected the facts. From that point on, I had to use the previous year's stats. I grew tired of arguing about computer database errors; as well as being too dumb to accurately count people and SM cups.